Anarchism and the National Liberation Struggle

Alfredo M. Bonanno

1976
Contents

Introduction 3

Anarchism and the National Liberation Struggle 5

Anarchists and the National Liberation Struggle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Marxists and the National Liberation Struggle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

Bakunin 14

Rudolf Rocker (Nationalism & Culture) 16

2
Introduction
Anarchists have tended to shy away from the problem of the national liberation struggle or rejected
it entirely because of their internationalist principles.
If internationalism is not to be merely meaningless rhetoric, it must imply solidarity between the
proletariat of different countries or nations. This is a concrete term. When there is a revolution, it will
be as it has been in the past, in a precise geographical area. How much it remains there will be directly
linked to the extent of that internationalism, both in terms of solidarity and of the spreading of the
revolution itself.
The patriotism of the people at a basic, unadulterated level is the struggle for their own autonomy,
a natural urge, a product of the life of a social group united by bonds of genuine solidarity and not
yet enfeebled by reflection or by the effect of economic and political interests as well as religious
abstractions. (Bakunin) Just as the State is an anti-human construction, so is nationalism a concept
designed to transcend and thwart the class struggle which exists wherever capitalism does (all over
the world). If the efforts of the people who are living in the social and economic ferment of what is
happening under the name of national liberation are left to their leaders, they risk finding themselves
no better off than before, living in micro-corporate States under whatever flag is chosen for them.
Anti-imperialism can mask local corporatism if the struggle is not put in class terms at a micro- as
well as macroscopic level. As the following article demonstrates, many of the Marxist groups engaged
in national liberation struggles are none too clear on this point.
Alfredo Bonannos article was written in response to a real situation, that of Italy, and in particular,
Sicily. At the present time in that country, where economic and political disintegration is rife, the
weakest link (Sicily) is being subjected to propaganda and actions directed towards creating a state of
tension in order to lay the shaky foundations for a separatist solution. This solution, a separate Sicilian
State, is being proposed by the forces of the right, i.e. the fascists, who have formed a tenuous working
alliance with the Mafia, who together are the willing servants of US interests through the intermediary
of the CIA. Each party has its own interests to establish and protect: the Mafia would gain access to
political contacts and facilities for financial transactions, the Americans would keep their hold on an
economy which is at present seeking solutions from the Communist Party, and maintain a strategic
base in the Mediterranean, and the fascists, once in power, would gain credibility, enabling them to
extend this power towards the North.
Needless to say the Sicilian proletariat would pay the price for this solution to the countrys prob-
lems, in the same way as up until now they have paid in sweat and blood for the development of the
North, as well as supplied cheap labour to the German and Swiss economies. This situation cannot be
discarded as irrelevant to revolutionaries simply because when it reaches the international eye it will
be masked as a nationalist struggle. The basic truth of Sicilian reality is a super-exploited proletariat
whose only solution can be sought through armed struggle for workers autonomy through a federal
or collectivist system of production of exchange.
To come nearer home, two situations immediately present themselves: the first, Ireland, which tends
to be left aside as being too complicated, or unconditionally supported as an anti-imperialist war. This

3
anti-imperialism needs to be clarified. That the Irish proletariat will never run their own lives while
British soldiers are occupying their land is a fact. But an internal dominator, whether Republican
or otherwise, with its own army or State apparatus, would be no less an obstacle. That the seeds of
revolution that have always been identified with national independence exist in Ireland is a fact, but
this fact is constantly being distorted by those with an interest in using racial and religious differences
to their own ends. Only through revolutionary economic and social change, through the autonomous
actions of the Irish exploited as a whole, supported by the exploited of Britain and the rest of the
world, will ethnic differences be redimensioned and superstructural fantasies be destroyed. Counter-
information must be brought out in opposition to the media which have thrived on stirring up hatred
around irrational issues. The economic foundations of these irrational issues should be laid bare to
the world, and economic solutions worked for through direct action to put production, distribution
and defence in the hands of the people themselves.
In Scotland big business has found new roots, and the nationalist argument is proving to be effec-
tive in getting workers to sacrifice themselves for the false goal of building the national economy
and curbing inflation, through independence from Whitehall. Multinational interests can thrive on
smaller centralised interdependent States, rather than through the old concept of the powerful nation.
At a social level, there are always personal (economic and status) interests to be gained: for example,
revival of language often means the possibility of a new local elite involved in the media, education
and so on.
At the same time, it is easy to understand why the exploited in deliberately underdeveloped Scotland
look at the centres of British capitalism and interpret their misery through a nationalist optic. The
revolutionary work of unmasking irrational nationalism should not disdain the basic struggle for
identity and self-management or divert it into a passive waiting for an abstract world revolution.
Anarchists must therefore work to show up the void of national self-determination, and disrupt
the corporate plans of parties, trades unions and bosses by identifying the real struggle for self-
appropriation and contributing to it in a concrete way. Along the road to generalised insurrection,
techniques of sabotage and defence must be in the hands of those directly involved, eliminating de-
pendence on outside groups and their ideologies, in order for them to take over production and distri-
bution and run their own areas on the basis of free federalism, collectivism, or both. Starting on this
self-managed basis in a logic where the transitional phase finds no place, the perspective of a wider
federation of free people becomes a foreseeable reality.
All this requires study and work, both at a practical and theoretical level. We hope that this pamphlet
will be a small contribution towards this end.

Jean Weir
Glasgow, June 1976

4
Anarchism and the National Liberation Struggle
Anarchism is internationalist, its struggle does not confine itself to one region or area in the world,
but extends everywhere alongside the proletariat who are struggling for their own liberation. This
requires a declaration of principles which are not abstract and vague, but concrete and well-defined.
We are not interested in a universal humanism which finds origin and justification in the French bour-
geois revolution of 1789. The declaration of the rights of man, a banner waved by all the democratic
governments in power today, deals with an abstract man who is identified with the bourgeois ideal.
We have often argued against a certain idealist anarchism which speaks of universal revolution,
acts of faith, illuminism, and in substance rejects the struggle of the proletariat and is anti-popular.
This anarchism becomes an individual and mythological humanitarianism with no precise social or
economic content. The whole planet comes to be seen as a biological unit and discussions end in a
sterile adjournment to the determining power of the superiority of the anarchist ideal over all other
ideals.
We think on the contrary that man is a historical being, who is born into and lives in a precise his-
torical situation. This places him in certain relationships with economic, social, linguistic and ethnic,
etc., structures, with important consequences in the field of science, philosophical reflection and con-
crete action. The problem of nationality is born from this historical direction and cannot be eliminated
from it without totally confusing the very foundation of anarchist federalism. As Bakunin wrote: Ev-
ery people, however small they are, possess their own character, their own particular way of living,
speaking, feeling, thinking and working, and this character, its specific mode of existence, is precisely
the basis of their nationality. It is the result of the whole of the historical life and all the conditions of
that peoples environment, a purely natural and spontaneous phenomenon.
The basis of anarchist federalism is the organisation of production and the distribution of goods,
as opposed to the political administration of people. In fact, once the revolution is underway and
production and distribution comes to be handled in a collectivist or communist way (or in various
ways according to needs and possibilities), the federal structure with its natural limits would render
the preceding political structure incongruous. It would be equally absurd to imagine such a wide
limit as one extending over the whole of the planet. If there will be a revolution at all it will be an
incomplete one, and this must materialise in space. Territorial limits will then not necessarily coincide
with the political confines of the preceding State which has been destroyed by the revolution. In this
case the ethnic division would take the place of the deforming political one. The cohesive elements of
the ethnic dimension are precisely those which help to identify nationality and which have been so
clearly expressed by Bakunin in the passage quoted above.
Anarchists refuse the principle of the dictatorship of the proletariat or the management of the pro-
letariat by a revolutionary minority using the ex-bourgeois State. They implicitly refuse the political
dimension of the existing bourgeois State from the very moment in which the revolution begins. We
cannot accept the use of the State apparatus in a revolutionary sense, therefore the provisional limit
to be given to the freely associated structures remains the ethnic one. It is in this sense that Kropotkin

5
saw the federation of free peoples, based on the approximate and incomplete example of the medieval
communes as a solution to the social problem.
But this argument, it must be clear, has nothing to do with separatism. The essential point of the
argument we are making here is that there is no difference between exploiters, that the fact of being
born in a certain place has no influence on class divisions. The enemy is he who exploits, organising
production and distribution in a capitalist dimension, even if this exploiter then calls us compatriot,
party comrade, or whatever other pleasing epithet. Class division is still based on exploitation put
into effect by capital with all the economic, social, cultural. religious, etc., means at its disposal, and
the ethnic basis which we identified as the limits of the revolutionary federation have nothing to do
with this. Unity with the internal exploiters is impossible, because no unity is possible between the
class of workers and the class of exploiters.
In this sense Rocker writes: We are anational. We demand the right of the free decision of each
commune, each region, each people; precisely for this reason we reject the absurd idea of a unitarian
national State. We are federalists, that is, partisans of a federation of free human groupings, which
do not separate themselves one from the other, but which, on the contrary, associate with the best
of intimate ties, through natural, moral and economic relations. The unity to which we aspire is a
cultural unity, a unity which goes forward on the most varied foundations, based on freedom and
capable of repelling every deterministic mechanism of reciprocal relations. For this reason we reject
every particularism and every separatism under which is hidden certain individual interests for
here we have an ideology where it is possible to discern the sordid interests of capitalist groups.
There remains to this day, even among anarchists when confronting the problem of nationality, a
living residual of idealistic reasoning. Not without reason, the anarchist Nido wrote in 1925, The
dismembering of a country is not considered a desirable ideal by many revolutionaries. How many
Spanish comrades would approve of the historical disappearance of Spain and its reorganisation on
a regional basis constituted of ethnic Castilian, Basque, Galician, and Catalan, etc. groups? Would
the revolutionaries in Germany resign themselves to a dismembering similar to a libertarian type of
organisation which based itself on the historical groups of Bavaria, Baden, Westphalia, Hannover, etc.?
On the other hand, these comrades would quite possibly like to see a dismembering of the present
British Empire, and a free and independent reorganisation of its colonies in Great Britain (Scotland,
Ireland, Wales) and overseas, which would not be pleasing to the English revolutionaries! Such are
men, and in this way, in the course of the last war (the 1 st World War), we saw the coexistence of
the concept of nationality in a historical sense, alongside the revolutionary claims of the anarchists.
(Obviously referring to Kropotkin and the Manifesto of the Sixteen.)
Nido refers to a state of mind which has not changed much. Even today, either due to a persistence
of the illuminist and masonic ideals within a certain part of the anarchist movement, or due to a
mental laziness which turns many comrades from the most burning problems and pushes them to
less troubled waters, the reactions in the face of the problem of nationality are not very different to
those described by Nido.
In itself the problem would not concern us much, if it was not that it has a very precise historical
outlet, and that the lack of clarity has extremely negative effects on many of the real struggles in
the course of development. In substance, the problem of nationality remains at a theoretical level,
while that of the struggle for national liberation is taking on increasingly in todays world, a practical
relevance of great importance.

6
Anarchists and the National Liberation Struggle
The process of decolonization has intensified within many imperialist structures since the last war,
urgently raising the problem of a socialist and internationalist interpretation of the national liberation
struggle. The drama of the Palestinian people, the struggles in Ireland, the Basque countries, Africa,
and Latin America, are continually posing the problem with a violence hitherto unknown.
Different economic forms within the same country determine a situation of colonisation, guaran-
teeing the process of centralisation. In other words, the persistence of capitalist production requires
inequalities in the rate of development in order to continue. Mandel writes on this subject, The in-
equality in the rate of development between different sectors and different firms is the cause of capi-
talist expansion. This explains how widened reproduction can continue until it reaches the exclusion
of every non-capitalist means. Surplus value is thus realised by means of an increase in the concen-
tration of capital. Mandel also treats unequal development between the various areas of one political
State. The basic principle of capitalism is that although it can assure partial equilibrium, it can never
assure total equilibrium, that is to say, it is incapable of industrialising systematically and harmo-
niously the whole of a vast territory. In other words, regional colonisation is not a consequence of
centralisation, but is on the contrary one of the preconditions of capitalist development. Naturally,
economic centralisation goes with political centralisation, and any allusions to democratic centralism
are merely demagogic formulae, used at certain historical moments. Even superficially examining the
facts of industrial and agricultural production from the unification of Italy to the end of the 1960s, one
can clearly see what tasks the State has assigned to the South: to supply capital (especially emigrants
returns, taxes, etc.), supply a cheap labour force (emigration to the North), and supply agricultural
products in exchange for industrial ones on the basis of the relationship of colonial exchange.
An objection to this could be that the State discriminates in this way between two bourgeois groups:
the industrialists of the North and the landowners of the South, but to understand this we must bear
in mind the different possibilities of exploitation between a highly developed and an underdeveloped
area. In the South a 12-14 hour day was normal while the eight hour day had already been gained
in the North. It is in this way that, thanks to the various advantages of a still medieval conception
of society, the Southern landowners continued to extract surplus value without much reinvestment.
Thus the development of the North was guaranteed through the exploitation and enslavement of the
South. The political rule of the North dictated this direction. which then took the course of capitalist
production in general. Integration into the Italian capitalist system produced a disintegration of the
Sicilian economy which in many aspects is of a pre-capitalist type. The law of the market obliged
the most backward regions to integrate with the basic capitalist system: this is the phenomenon of
colonisation, which comes about in foreign regions or nations, as well as in the internal regions of
single capitalist States.
The next stage in capitalist development is the leap over the national frontier which has been weak-
ened by the polarisation of the surrounding economies at the peaks of exchange monopolisation.
Colonisation gives way to imperialism.
Here is what the comrades of Front Libertaire wrote on the question: National liberation move-
ments must bear this reality in mind and not stop at a pre-imperialist analysis which would lead to a
regional thirdworldism. That would mean that their revolutionary struggle would remain within the
dialectic of coloniser-colonised, while ends to be attained would only be political independence, na-
tional sovereignty, regional autonomy, etc. This would be a superficial analysis, and not take account
of global reality. The enemy to be defeated by the Irish, the Bretons, the Provenals, for example, is not

7
England and France, but the whole of the bourgeoisie whether English, Breton, Provenal or Ameri-
can. In this way the ties which unite the regional bourgeoisie with the national and world bourgeoisie
can be understood.
In this way national liberation goes beyond simple internal decolonisation and attacks the real
situation of imperialist capitalist development, putting the objective of the destruction of the political
State into a revolutionary dimension.
Ethnic limits also become easily recognisable. The ethnic limit in the revolutionary process of free
federations of production and distribution associations has its counterpart in the pre-revolutionary
phase within a class dimension. The ethnic base of today consists of the whole of the exploited people
who live in a given territory of a given nation, there being no common ethnic base between exploiter
and exploited. It is logical that this class basis will be destroyed along with the destruction of the
political State, where the ethnic limit will no longer coincide with the exploited living within a given
territory, but with the whole of the men and women living in that territory who have chosen to live
their lives freely.
On this problem the comrades of Fronte Libertaire continue: Ethnic culture is not that of all who
are born or who live in the same territory and speak the same language. It is the culture of those who,
in a given group, suffer the same exploitation. Ethnic culture is class culture, and for this reason is
revolutionary culture. Even if the class consciousness of the workers corresponds to a working class
in a situation of national dependence, it is nevertheless the class consciousness which will carry the
struggle to its conclusion: the destruction of capitalism in its present state. The decisive struggle to
be carried out must be a worldwide class struggle of exploited against exploiters, beginning from a
struggle without frontiers, with precise tactics against the nearest bourgeoisie, especially if they pro-
claim themselves nationalist. This class struggle is moreover the only way of saving and stimulating
the ethnic specification on which it would be possible to build stateless socialism.
The anarchist programme concerning the national liberation struggle is therefore clear: it must not
go towards constituting an intermediate stage towards the social revolution through the formation
of new national States. Anarchists refuse to participate in national liberation fronts; they participate
in class fronts which may or may not be involved in national liberation struggles. The struggle must
spread to establish economic, political and social structures in the liberated territories, based on fed-
eralist and libertarian organisations.
Revolutionary Marxists who, for reasons we cannot analyse here, monopolise the various situations
where national liberation struggles are are in course, cannot always reply with such clarity to the
perspective of a radical contestation of State centralisation. Their myth of the withering away of the
bourgeois State and their pretention of using it, creates an insurmountable problem.

Marxists and the National Liberation Struggle

If we can share the class analysis made by some Marxists groups such as that elaborated by a part
of the E.T.A. which we published in no. 3 of Anarchismo , what we cannot accept is the fundamental
hypothesis of the formation of a workers State based on the dictatorship of the proletariat, more or
less along the lines of the preceding political State according to the organisational capacity of the
individual national liberation organisations. For example, the E.T.A. comrades are fighting for a free
Basque country, but are not very interested in a free Catalonia or a free Andalusia. Here we come
back to the doubts so well expressed by Nido which we quoted above. At the basis of many Marxist

8
analyses there lurks an irrational nationalism which is never very clear. Going back to the Marxist
classics and their polemic with Bakunin, we are able to reconstruct a kind of dialogue between the
two, glancing at a similar piece of work done by the Bulgarian comrade Balkanski.
In 1948, immediately after the Slav congress where he had unsuccessfully developed the idea of
a Slav federation to reunite a free Russia and all the Slav peoples to serve as a first nucleus for a
future European federation and then a greater universal federation of peoples, Bakunin took part in
the insurrection of Prague. Following the Prague events, Bakunin, hunted by the police, took refuge
in Berlin and established close contacts with a few Czech students with the aim of attempting an
insurrection in Bohemia. At this time, (the beginning of 1849), he published Appeal to the Slavs which
resulted in his being quite unjustly accused of pan-Slavism. Marx and Engels replied with a sour
criticism in their paper Neue Rheinischer Zeiting. Let us now see this hypothetical dialogue as it is
suggested by Balanski.

Bakunin: The Slav peoples who are enslaved under Austria, Hungary and Turkey, must
reconquer their freedom and unite with Russia, free from Zsarism, in a Slav federation.
Marx-Engels: All these small, powerless and stunted nations basically owe recognition to
those who, according to historical necessity, attach them to some great empire, thereby
allowing them to participate in a historical development which, had they been left to
themselves would have remained quite foreign to them. Clearly such a result cannot be
reached without treading upon some sensitive areas. Without violence nothing can be
achieved in history.
Bakunin: We must allow in particular for the liberation of the Czechs, the Slovaks and
the Moravians, and their reunification in one single entity.
Marx-Engels: The Czechs, among whom we must include the Moravians and the Slovaks,
have never had a history. After Charlemagne, Bohemia was amalgamated with Germany.
For a while the Czech nation emancipated themselves to form the Great Moravian Empire.
Consequently, Bohemia and Moravia were definitively attached to Germany and the Slo-
vak regions remained to Hungary. And this inexistent nation from a historical point of
view is demanding independence? It is inadmissable to grant independence to the Czechs
because then East Germany would seem like a small loaf gnawed away by rats.
Bakunin: The Poles, enslaved by three states, must belong to a community on an equal
basis along with their present dominators: the Germans, the Austrians, the Hungarians
and the Russians.
Marx-Engels: The Germans conquest of the Slav regions between Elba and the Warthe
was a geographical and strategical necessity resulting from the divisions in the Carlovin-
gian Empire. The reason is clear. The result cannot be questioned. This conquest was in
the interest of civilisation, there can be no doubt about it.
Bakunin: The Southern Slavs, enslaved by a foreign minority, must be freed.
Marx-Engels: It is of vital necessity for the Germans and the Hungarians to cut them-
selves out of the Adriatic. Geographical and commercial considerations must come before
anything else. It is perhaps a pity that magnificent California has recently been snatched
from the inept Mexicans who do not know what to do with it? The independence of
a few Spaniards in California and Texas might possibly suffer. Justice and other moral

9
 principles are perhaps denied in all that. But what can be done in the face of so many
other events of this kind in universal history?
Bakunin: So long a one single persecuted nation exists, the final and complete triumph
of democracy will not be possible anywhere. The oppression of a people or a single indi-
vidual, is the oppression of all, and it is not possible to violate the liberty of one without
violating the liberty of all.
Marx-Engels: In the pan-Slav manifesto we have found nothing but these more or less
moral categories: justice, humanity, freedom, equality, fraternity, independence, which
sound good, but which can do nothing in the political and historical field. We repeat,
not one Slav people apart from the Poles the Russians and perhaps the Turkish Slavs
has a future for the simple reason that all the other Slavs lack the most elementary
historical, geographical, political and industrial bases. Independence and vitality fail them.
The conquerors of the various Slav nations have the advantage of energy and vitality.
Bakunin: The liberation and federation of the Slavs is only the prelude to the union of
the European republics.
Marx-Engels: It is impossible to unite all peoples under a republican flag with love and
universal fraternity. It is in the bloody struggle of a revolutionary war that unification
will be forged.
Bakunin: Certainly, in the social revolution, the West, and especially the Latin peoples,
will preceed the Russians; but it will nevertheless be the Slav masses who will make the
first revolutionary move and will guarantee the results.
Marx-Engels: We reply that the hatred of the Russians and the first revolutionary passion
of the Germans, and now the hatred of the Czechs and the Croates are beginning to
intersect. The revolution can only be saved by putting into effect a decisive terror against
the Slav peoples who for their perspective of their miserable national independence,
have sold out democracy and the revolution. Some day we shall take bloody revenge
upon the Slavs for this vile and scandalous betrayal.

There can be no doubt about these radical counterpositions. Marx and Engels remain tied to a deter-
minist view of history which is intended to be materialist, but which is not free from certain Hegelian
premises, lessening the possibility of an analytical method. Moreover, they, especially Marx, let fly
on strategic evaluations which reveal an emphasis on liberal-patriotism which, if it was justifiable
in 1849, was a lot less so in 1855. Nevertheless at this time, during the Crimean war, he writes: The
great peninsula south of the Sava and the Danube, this marvelous country, has the misfortune of be-
ing inhabited by a conglomeration of races and nationalities which are very different, and one cannot
say which would be the best suited for progress and civilisation. Slavs, Greeks, Rumanians, Albanians,
almost 12 million in all, are dominated by a million Turks. To this day one might ask if of all these
races, the Turks were not the most qualified to have the hegemony which can evidently be exercised
over this mixed population by one nation.
And again in 1879, in the course of the Russian-Turkish war, which today the communists call the
Bulgarian patriots war of liberation, Marx wrote, We definitely support the Turks, and that for two
reasons. The first is that we have studied the Turkish peasants, that is, the Turkish popular masses,
and we are convinced that they are one of the most representative, hard working and morally healthy

10
of the European peasants. The second is that the defeat of the Russians will accelerate considerably
the social revolution which is rising to a period of radical transformation in the whole of Europe.
In fact, the Marxist movements for national liberation, when ruled by a minority who eventually
transform themselves into a party (a generalised situation at the present time), end up using strategical
distinctions, leaving the essential problems which in point of fact also influence strategy in second
place.
The Marxists do not, for example, go into the difference between the imperialism of large States
and the nationalism of small ones, often using the term nationalism in both cases. This causes great
confusion. The nationalism of the small States is often seen as something which contains a positive
nucleus, an internal revolt of a social character, but the detailed class distinction is usually limited
to the strictly necessary, according to strategic perspectives. It is often maintained, unconsciously
following in this the great maestro Trotsky, that if on the one hand the upsurge of the people and
oppressed minorities is immutable, the working class vanguard must never try to accelerate this thrust,
but limit themselves to following the impulses while remaining outside.
This is what Trotsky wrote in January 1931: The separatist trends in the Spanish revolution raise the
democratic problem of the right of a nationality to self-determination. These tendencies, seen super-
ficially, have worsened during the dictatorship. But while the separatism of the Catalan bourgeoisie
is nothing but a means for them to play the Madrid government against the Catalan and Spanish
people, the separatism of the workers and peasants is just the covering of a deeper revolt of a social
nature. We must make a strong distinction between these two types of separatism. Nevertheless, it
is precisely to distinguish the workers and peasants oppressed in their national sentiment, from the
bourgeoisie that the vanguard of the proletariat must take up this question of the right of the nation
to autonomy, which is the most courageous and sincere position. The workers will defend totally and
without reserve, the right of the Catalans and Basques to live as independent States in the case of the
majority opting for a complete separation, which does not mean to say at all that the working elite
must push the Catalans and Basques on to the road of separatism. On the contrary, the economic
unity of the country, with great autonomy for nationalities, would offer the workers and peasants
great advantages from the economic point of view and from that of culture in general.
It is clear to see that the counterposition is the most radical possible. Marxists and Trotskyists follow
systems of reasoning which for us have nothing to do with the free decision of the exploited minori-
ties to determine the conditions of their own freedom. It is not the case to take up the fundamental
theoretical differences, but it is enough to reread Trotskys passage to realise the theoretical ambigui-
ties it contains, and how much space is given to a political strategy favourable to the establishment of
a dictatorship by an illuminated minority, and how little would be done towards the real freedom
of the exploited. The ambiguous use of the term separatism should be underlined, and the insistence
upon irrational arguments such as those relative to the national sentiment.

Conclusion
Many problems have been raised in this work, with the awareness that they have only been done
so in part, due to their wide complexity. We began from a situation of fact: that of Sicily, and a process
of dismembering capable of causing incalculable damage in the near future. We have said how this
process sees, in our opinion, a union of fascists and mafia, and how the interests which these people
want to protect are substantially those of the Americans. The circulation of certain stale separatist

11
formulae has obliged us to take as clear as possible a position, and seek to single out the essential
points of anarchist internationalism in the face of the problem of the national liberation struggle. We
have also given a brief panoramic sketch of a few of the interpretive defects latent in the orthodox
Marxist view of the problem and a few strategic obtusities which in practice determine the no small
difficulties which the Marxist-inspired national liberation movements find themselves. We shall now
try to conclude our research with a few indications of theoretical interest.
We must thoroughly re-examine the problem of the relationship between structure and superstruc-
ture. Many comrades remain within the Marxist model and do not realise it, so much this has pene-
trated our current way of seeing things. The power which the Marxists now hold in our universities
allows them to propose a certain analytical model to the intellectual minorities, selling it off as real-
ity with their usual complacency. In particular, it is the conception of means of production which
must be put to careful analysis, showing the limitations and consequences of the deterministic use of
the economic factor. Today economic reality has changed and cannot fit into the Marxist typology;
nevertheless they do their utmost to complicate matters by attempting to thus explain events which
would otherwise be easily explicable. Interpolating more open models of reasoning, we should be
able to identify relevant factors such as precisely the national and cultural or ethnic particularities.
These enter into a wider process of exploitation and determine quantitative changes rendering possi-
ble exploitation itself and, in the last analysis, cause the emergence of other changes, this time of a
qualitative nature. Peoples and classes, political and cultural formations, ideological movements and
the concrete struggle, all undergo interpretative changes in relation to the basic model. If a mecha-
nistic determinism is accepted, the consequences are the inevitable dictatorship of the proletariat, the
passage towards a not easily understood and historically non-documentable progressive elimination
of the State: on the contrary, if the interpretative model is open and indeterministic, if individual will
comes to be included in a process of reciprocal influence with class consciousness, if the various socio-
cultural entities are analysed not only economically but also more widely (socially) the consequences
would be very different: precon. ceived statist ideas would give way to the possibility of a horizontal
libertarian construction, a federalist project of production and distribution.
Certainly all this requires not only the negation of a mechanistic materialism which, in our opinion,
is the result of Marxism, but also a certain idealism which, still in our opinion, comes to infect a part
of anarchism. In the same way, universalism intended as an absolute value is ahistorical and idealised,
because such illuministic postulating is nothing other than the inverted ideal of reformed Christianity.
It is not possible to see clearly behind the Western hegemony how much of it was developed by the
ideology of a false freedom, an ambiguous humanitarianism with a cosmopolitan basis. The myth of
the white mans domination is represented in various forms as the myth of civilisation and science,
and therefore as the foundation of the political hegemony of a few States over others. The masonic and
illuminist ideology could bolster the Jacobinism hidden within the Leninist version of Marxism, but
has nothing to do with anarchism, despite the fact that many comrades continue to amuse themselves
with abstract schemes and outdated theories.
Anarchists should give all their support, concrete regarding participation, theoretical concerning
analyses and study, to national liberation struggles. This should be begun from the autonomous or-
ganisation of the workers, with a clear vision of class counterpositions, that is putting the local bour-
geoisie in their correct class dimension, and prepare the federalist construction of the future society
which should rise from the social revolution. On this basis, which leaves no room for determinisms
and idealisms of various species, any fascist instrumentalisation of the oppressed peoples aspirations

12
can easily be fought. It is necessary though that in the first place we become clear among ourselves,
looking forward and building the correct analyses for an anarchist revolutionary strategy.

13
Bakunin
The State is not the Fatherland, it is the abstraction, the metaphysical, mystical, political, juridical
fiction of the Fatherland. The common people of all countries deeply love their fatherland; but that is
a natural, real love. The patriotism of the people is not just an idea, it is a fact; but political patriotism,
love of the State, is not the faithful expression of that fact: it is an expression distorted by means of a
false abstraction, always for the benefit of an exploiting minority.
Fatherland and nationality are, like individuality, each a natural and social fact, physiological and
historical at the same time; neither of them is a principle. Only that can be called a human principle
which is universal and common to all men; and nationality separates men, therefore it is not a prin-
ciple. What is a principle is the respect which everyone should have for natural facts, real or social.
Nationality, like individuality, is one of those facts. Therefore we should respect it. To violate it is
to commit a crime, and, to speak the language of Mazzini, it becomes a sacred principle each time it
is menaced and violated. And that is why I feel myself always sincerely the patriot of all oppressed
fatherlands.
The Essence of Nationality. A fatherland represents the incontestable and sacred right of every man,
of every human group, association, commune, region, and nation to live, to feel, to think, to want, and
to act in its own way, and this manner of living and feeling is always the incontestable result of a long
historic development.
Nationality and Universal Solidarity. There is nothing more absurd and at the same time more
harmful, more deadly for the people than to uphold the fictitious principle of nationality as the ideal
of all the peoples aspirations. Nationality is not a universal human principle: it is a historic, local fact
which, like all real and harmless facts, has the right to claim general acceptance. Every people and the
smallest folk-unit has its own character, its own specific mode of existence, its own way of speaking,
feeling, thinking, and acting; and it is this idiosyncrasy that constitutes the essence of nationality,
which is the result of the whole historic life and the sum total of the living conditions of that people.
Every people, like every person, is involuntarily that which it is and therefore has a right to be
itself. Therein consists the so-called national rights. But if a certain people or person exists in fact
in a determinate form, it does not follow that it or he has a right to uphold nationality in one case
and individuality in the other as specific principles, and that they have to keep on forever fussing
over them. On the contrary, the less they think of themselves and the more they become imbued with
universal human values, the more vitalised they become, the more charged with meaning nationality
becomes in one instance, and individuality in the other.
The Historic Responsibility of Every Nation. The dignity of every nation, like that of every individ-
ual, should consist mainly in each accepting full responsibility for its acts, without seeking to shift it
to others. Are they not very foolish, all these lamentations of a big boy complaining with tears in his
eyes that someone has corrupted him, and put him on the evil path? And what is unbecoming in the
case of a boy is certainly out of place in the case of a nation, whose very feeling of self-respect should
preclude any attempts to shift the blame for its own mistakes upon others.

14
 Patriotism and Universal Justice. Every one of us should rise above the narrow, petty patriotism to
which ones own country is the centre of the world, and which deems itself great in so far as it makes
itself feared by its neighbours. We should place human, universal justice above all national interests.
And we should once and for all time abandon the false principle of nationality, invented of late by the
despots of France, Russia and Prussia for the purpose of crushing the sovereign principle of liberty.
Nationality is not a principle: it is a legitimate fact, just as individuality is. Every nationality, great or
small, has the incontestable right to be itself, to live according to its own nature. This right is simply
the corollary of the general principle of freedom.

15
Rudolf Rocker (Nationalism & Culture)
The old opinion which ascribes the creation of the nationalist state to the awakened national con-
sciousness of the people is but a fairy tale, very serviceable to the supporters of the idea of the national
state, but false, none the less. The nation is not the cause, but the result of the state. It is the state which
creates the nation, not the nation the state. Indeed, from this point of view there exists between people
and nation the same distinction as between society and the state.
Every social unit is a natural foundation which, on the basis of common needs and mutual agree-
ment, is built organically from below upwards to guarantee and protect the general interest. Even
when social institutions gradually ossify or become rudimentary the purpose of their origin can in
most instances be clearly recognised. Every state organisation, however, is an artificial mechanism
imposed on men from above by some ruler, and it never pursues any other ends but to defend and
make secure the interests of privileged minorities in society.
A people is the natural result of social union, a mutual association of men brought about by a
certain similarity of external conditions of living, a common language, and special characteristics
due to climate and geographic environment. In this manner arise certain common traits, alive in
every member of the union, and forming a most important part of its social existence. This inner
relationship can as little be artificially bred as artificially destroyed. The nation, on the other hand, is
the artificial result of the struggle for political power, just as nationalism has never been anything but
the political religion of the modern state. Belonging to a nation is never determined, as is belonging
to a people, by profound and natural causes; it is always subject to political considerations and based
on those reasons of state behind which the interests of privileged minorities always hide A small
group of diplomats who arc simply the business representatives of privileged caste and class decide
quite arbitrarily the national membership of certain men, who are not even asked for their consent.
but must submit to this exercise of power because they cannot help themselves.
Peoples and groups of peoples existed long before the state put in its appearance. Today, also, they
exist and develop without the assistance of tire state. They are only hindered in their natural devel-
opment when some external power interferes by violence with their life and forces it into patterns
which it has not known before. The nation is, then, unthinkable without the state. It is welded to that
for weal or woe and owes its being solely to its presence. Consequently, the essential nature of the
nation will always escape us if we attempt to separate it from the state and endow it with a life of its
own which it has never possessed. A people is always a community with rather narrow boundaries.
But a nation, as a rule, encompasses a whole array of different peoples and groups of peoples who
have by more or less violent means been pressed into the frame of a common state. In fact, in all of
Europe there is no state which does not consist of a group of different peoples who were originally of
different descent and speech and were forced together into one nation solely by dynastic, economic
and political interests.
ALL nationalism is reactionary in its nature, for it strives to enforce on the separate parts of the
great human family a definite character according to a preconceived idea. In this respect, too, it shows
the interrelationship of nationalistic ideology with the creed of every revealed religion. Nationalism

16
creates artificial separations and partitions within that organic unity which finds its expression in the
genus Man, while at the same time it strives for a fictitious unity sprung only from a wish-concept;
and its advocates would like to tune all members of a definite human group to one note in order to
distinguish it from other groups still more obviously. In this respect, so-called cultural nationalism
does not differ at all from political nationalism, for whose political purposes as a rule it serves as a fig
leaf. The two cannot be spiritually separated; they merely represent two different aspects of the same
endeavour.
Cultural nationalism appears in its purest form when people are subjected to a foreign rule, and
for this reason cannot pursue their ow it plans for political power. In this event, national thought
prefers to busy itself with the culture-building activities of the people and tries to keep the national
consciousness alive by recollections of vanished glory and past greatness. Such comparisons between
a past which has already, become legend and a slavish present make the people doubly sensitive to
the injustice suffered; for nothing affects the spirit of man more powerfully than tradition. But if
such groups of people succeed sooner or later in shaking off the foreign yoke and themselves ap-
pear as a national power, then the cultural phase of their effort steps only too definitely into the
background, giving place to the sober reality of their political objectives. In the recent history of the
various national organisms in Europe created after the war are found telling witnesses for this. In
culture-nationalism, as a rule, two distinct sentiments merge, which really have nothing in common:
for home sentiment is not patriotism, is not love of the state, not love which has its roots in the ab-
stract idea of the nation. It needs no labored explanation to prove that the spot of land on which man
has spent the years of his youth is deeply intergrown with his profoundest feeling. The impressions
of childhood and early youth which are the most permanent and have the most lasting effect upon
his soul. Home is, so to speak, mans outer garment; he is most intimately acquainted with its every
fold and seam. This home sentiment brings in later years some yearning after a past long buried under
ruins: and it is this which enables the romantic to look so deeply within.
With so-called national consciousness this home sentiment has no relationship; although both are
often thrown into the same pot and, after the manner of counterfeiters, given out as of the same value.
In fact, true home sentiment is destroyed at its birth by national consciousness, which always strives
to regulate and force into a prescribed form every impression man receives from the inexhaustible
variety of the homeland. This is the unavoidable result of those mechanical efforts at unification which
are in reality only the aspirations of the nationalistic states.
The attempt to replace mans natural attachment to the home by a dutiful love of the state a struc-
ture which owes its creation to all sorts of accidents and in which, with brutal force, elements have
been welded together that have no necessary connection is one of the most grotesque phenomena
of our time. The so-called national consciousness is nothing but a belief propagated by considera-
tions of political power which have replaced the religious fanaticism of past centuries and have today
come to be the greatest obstacle to cultural development. The love of home has nothing in common
with the veneration of an abstract patriotic concept. Love of home knows no will to power; it is free
from that hollow and dangerous attitude of superiority to the neighbour which is one of the strongest
characteristics of every kind of nationalism. Love of home does not engage in practical politics nor
does it seek in any way to support the state. It is purely an inner feeling as freely manifested as mans
enjoyment of nature, of which home is a part. When thus viewed, the home feeling compares with
the governmentally ordered love of the nation as does a natural growth with an artificial substitute.

17
 The Anarchist Library
Anti-Copyright

Alfredo M. Bonanno
Anarchism and the National Liberation Struggle
1976

Retrieved on October 10, 2010 from digitalelephant.blogspot.com

Bratach Dubh Anarchist Pamphlets 1
First published 1976

theanarchistlibrary.org